The "biological incentives" of being gay (or bi, or ace, or aro, or child-free-by-choice, or (hetero) butt stuff and blowjobs, or all the other things from the a-z of human relationships that aren't pro-reproduction) were still an open question last I heard.

At the simplest biological level, the burden of being pregnant is only borne by one gender (or sex, or whatever).

Birth control changes this of course, but society (let alone biology!) hasn’t adapted to that yet. It’s very unclear where we’ll end up long term.

STD risk is dramatically higher for women too, but one could make a ‘giver/receiver’ argument with men that is less clear. Still less risk though I believe.

Men have always been able to ‘hit and run’ in a way that women can’t. No one is getting pregnant because they were ACE, or had homosexual sex (with either gender). So it’s about meeting one’s own needs, with limited consequences, for both parties.

Marriage and other forms of sexual control has always been about trying to get a degree of accountability and stability that is a compromise between the sexes so that society isn’t inundated with the poverty, countless needless deaths and out of control orphans/unwanted children that result otherwise. At least pre birth control.

Shotgun weddings were a thing for a reason! Dad was going to get stuck with the costs of raising some random assholes kid otherwise, and fuck that!

And out of control physical violence and abuse if men don’t get what they need too (which is more than just sex, despite what many men will say).

If things don’t get reined in somewhat, we’re going to be Brazil - if we’re lucky.

Could you elaborate on what Brazil is in this context?

(Even more) massive wealth disparities, as the ‘have’s’ are able to keep their eye on the ball more effective and retain/build wealth, and everyone else gets distracted and ‘played’.

Large segments of the population ending up in Favelas, insane crime rates + massive drug use, general chaos and social disorder, especially in the cities.

Think ‘US in the late 70’s, early 80’s’ but with way more people, denser, and more intense.

We know a lot more about heterosexual mating strategies than male-male homosexual mating strategies because you can just apply the vast body of animal behavioural studies to understand human heterosexual (and female-female homosexual) mating strategies.

Males that refuse to mate with females is something that we only see in humans. It’s inherently less well understood. You can’t apply the vast body of animal behavioural studies because all males of all other species will mate with females.

You can hypothesis generate with evolutionary logic, but that doesn’t mean anything until you do some experiments.

>>Males that refuse to mate with females is something that we only see in humans

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homosexual_behavior_in_animals

I am not sure where you got your data but male male mating seems to be rather well researched in animals.

Just grabbing one of the many quotes:

----- One species in which exclusive homosexual orientation occurs is the domesticated sheep (Ovis aries).[8][9] "About 10% of rams (males), refuse to mate with ewes (females) but do readily mate with other rams."[9]

Male-male mating is super common.

The part you’re missing is that all of those males that mate with males will mate with females as well.

The paper Wikipedia references about rams notes that the only mammals with exclusive homosexual behaviour are sheep and humans. Exclusive homosexual mating is exceptionally rare. There are about 6000 mammal species.

The Wikipedia sentence should read the only other mammal which exhibits exclusively homosexual mating behaviour is sheep.

Also domesticated animals have been under some pretty weird selection pressures so you have to be careful comparing their behaviour to a wild type animal like humans.

Anecdotal, but all humans I ever met are very much domesticated.

They get angry if you tell them that though. /s

It’s called the self domestication hypothesis. It’s controversial tho.

not really. it is well known in non politically influenced circles that hormonal exposure in the uterus is a great predictor of sexuality and behaviour.

The causal mechanism isn't the same thing as "why hasn't evolution selected against this"[0] and neither is the same thing as subjective incentives.

[0] one suggestion is the "gay uncle hypothesis" which posits that people who themselves do not have children may nonetheless increase the prevalence of their family's genes in future generations by providing resources (e.g., food, supervision, defense, shelter) to the offspring of their closest relatives; this hypothesis seems to be consistent with the evidence without being sufficient on its own.

Near as I can tell, it’s also evolutionary advantageous to have significant ‘randomness’ as far as traits across a population. Especially for humans due to the extreme variation in environmental conditions and stresses we end up producing for ourselves.

Being a hero by jumping on a grenade is a pretty terrible survival trait for an individual for instance, but essential for the group to have at least one in any decent sized population. All the non-grenade-coverers will strongly support such folks, as long as it doesn’t hurt their own survival chances somehow.

So if we look at individual tendencies as coming more from die rolls than anything else, with a wide distribution, a lot of outlier behavior makes a lot of sense.

A hardcore survivalist most of the time is going to be selected against, for instance, for many reasons when things are going well. They’re dumping all their stats points in the wrong categories!

But any population that doesn’t have at least a few is going to completely disappear on those rare long tail events (an actual nuclear war?).

And if those survivalists are actually capable, they get the benefit of ‘seeding’ the next generation without any competition! Long odds, but potential huge payoff biologically.

That sounds plausible, I wonder how strong the effect size is?

Part of the problem is how you’d measure/quantify it, I imagine. Especially since many of the really interesting edge cases will want to hide.

Also many of the traits might also only show up under extreme stress, and we’ve learned to frown on doing destructive a/b tests on entire cultures.

That's the 'how', not the 'why'. I think biological incentive here means, the reason human evolution retained certain traits. An interesting theory for that is that gays and lesbians can cooperate with their siblings to raise nieces and nephews, instead of competing with them for resources.

And individually would benefit from positive relationships with those nieces and nephews (financially, physically when old, socially), without having to directly bear the costs of having those kids either.

JBS Haldane: I would be willing to lay down my life for two brothers or eight cousins.

Still, females usually get more attached after sex , and that's biological.

Hmmm....men are fairly highly pressured by (modern western) society to not get attached after sex, and are somewhat likely to deny or at least play down feelings of attachment that they might naturally feel - even to themselves.

I'm not sure how you'd be able to control for that sort of bias in any kind of rigorous study, or how much variation might be left if you did.

That is not true. Especially after you leave the 20s. Men in western nations have a loneliness problem that women never experience as a group to that extent. After women give up on the prospects of children which usually happens somewhere in the 30s, the dynamics of sex and relationships changes dramatically with men by far being the more clingy ones.

Do we know what they are? No.

But the dynamics between men and women are so damn different it's evident there must be a difference to begin with. Just because it's not proven and not certain 100% doesn't mean we can't look at it and go "yep, this really seems to work a certain way".

There are no double blind tests done for parachutes.